Monday, October 24, 2011

Panoramio and Copyright

The Panoramio community realized immediately though, that the image was not linked from Tore’s gallery but from another user’s gallery. The image was copied, published in another account’s gallery and submitted to the Panoramio monthly contest.

As soon as we realized the abuse, we corrected the mistake and took action on the infringing account. Since it was so swiftly reported through our users, I want to thank the Panoramio Community for finding and reporting this abuse. At the same time I want to use the opportunity to clarify the DMCA procedure.

When you upload an image to Panoramio you can decide on the permissions you give to that image following the Creative Commons (CC) licensing. You can define the license photo by photo or you can have a general setting across all the photos you upload in Panoramio. To change this, you can go to your Settings page in the “Sharing, licenses and copyright” section.

Adding CC licensing to your image will not avoid misuse of your material, but it will give you the right to complain about it. If your image has been copied within Panoramio you can report it using the DMCA infringement form. If the image is copied in any other Google property, you have also available a general Google DMCA form.

It may happen in some cases that a photo hosted in Panoramio is displayed in another site or media. If the site displaying the image is not using the Panoramio API to do so, or it is not following the rights that you are providing in your CC licensing, you can file a complain directly to the site that is infringing your rights. In most of the cases they are not aware they are infringing your rights and they may take action following your notification.

Thanks again for your help on this and thanks for respecting the rights of the photographers.

For more information regarding this subject, please visit the documentation about copyright in our help content.